Wild fruit galore

As I mentioned before, this year the wild plums are producing abundantly. Last year, nada. This year ... holy cow.

We have a massive plum tree in our driveway.

The fruit was so heavy, I was afraid some of the branches would break.

The fruit often looked like clusters of big grapes.

I was describing this bounty of wild plums to a woman at our church, and she wanted to know if she could have some. You bet! In addition to our tree, I called a neighbor who has two abundantly fruitful trees right on the road and got permission to harvest some of his plums.

Between the neighbor's trees and our tree, our church friend went home with somewhere on the order of ten gallons of plums. The branches of our trees are a lot lighter.

And that's not all. Now the apples are maturing. They're not ripe yet, but they're getting there.

We have several venerable apple trees on our property, trees we had professionally trimmed (back when we had money) in an effort to bring them back into productivity. The trees are producing heavily, though the apples are still fairly small. However they're delicious.

There are also thousands upon thousands of wild apple trees in our region.

But wait, there's more! We also have blackberries. Lots and lots of blackberries.

Again, last year, this ubiquitous fruit yielded nothing. Zip, zilch, zero, nada. This year, as with the plums, it's making up for lost time. While we have some outlier berries already ripening, most won't get ripe until late August through mid-September.

Personally I hate blackberries. Not the fruit itself (that's delicious!), but how aggressively the vines spread. There are whole hillsides and pastures taken over by blackberries. That was one nice thing about our last home; we didn't have any blackberries around us.

But say what you will, we live in a spot that has wild fruit galore. It benefits the wildlife immeasurably. That's a lot to be thankful for ... even with blackberries.